Michael Aaron Persky (born 1962) is an American attorney and former judge of the Santa Clara County Superior Court from 2003 to 2018. He gained attention after his ruling in the case People v. Turner, in which he in June 2016 sentenced Stanford University student Brock Turner to 6 months in prison for the sexual assault and attempted rape of an unconscious 22-year-old woman, Chanel Miller, which was a sentence recommended by the Santa Clara County Probation Department. Despite allegations that race, gender, and class bias influenced his lenient sentencing of Turner (prosecutors had asked for six years), the California Commission on Judicial Performance found no wrongdoing in their investigation of the case. Nonetheless, Persky was recalled by voters on June 5, 2018, during the 2018 Califor